“ASC” shows up after a lot of famous names Roger Deakins, ASC. Hoyte van Hoytema, ASC. It gets casually called a union or a guild all the time, including by people in the industry. It’s neither. Here’s what it actually is, how long it’s been around, and how it’s different from the organization that actually represents cinematographers for pay and working conditions.
The American Society of Cinematographers is a professional, cultural, and educational organization explicitly not a labor union and not a guild. Membership is by invitation, based on a body of work, and it functions more like an honor society than a bargaining unit. Its stated mission, since day one, has been advancing the art and science of cinematography and bringing cinematographers together to exchange ideas and promote the medium as an art form.
The ASC was chartered by the state of California on January 8, 1919, founded by fifteen members. It grew out of two earlier groups — the Cinema Camera Club, founded in New York in 1913 by Arthur Miller, Phil Rosen, and Frank Kugler, and the Static Club of America. Philip E. Rosen became the ASC’s first president. In 1920, the organization launched American Cinematographer magazine, still published today, with its first issue on November 1 of that year. That makes the ASC well over a century old as of 2026.
To add to the confusion, the ASC also runs its own annual awards show, the ASC Awards, honoring outstanding cinematography in film and television separate from, and voted on independently of, the Academy Awards. It’s not unusual for the same cinematographer to win the ASC Award and then go on to win, or lose, the Oscar weeks later; the two bodies vote from different pools of judgment entirely. The ceremony has moved around Hollywood over the years, from the Hollywood & Highland Ray Dolby Ballroom to the Beverly Hilton, and in 2021 was even held virtually from the ASC Clubhouse itself the organization’s own historic headquarters, which functions as both a private social club and a working piece of industry history.
The organization that actually functions as a labor union for cinematographers and camera crew is IATSE Local 600, the International Cinematographers Guild. Its roots trace back further than most people realize IATSE itself was founded in 1893, and the first dedicated cinematographers’ local was chartered in New York in 1926, followed shortly after by locals in Los Angeles and Chicago. For seventy years, those three regional locals 644, 659, and 666 operated separately, which meant crews working across different cities sometimes had to pay dues and initiation fees to multiple locals with their benefits split between separate plans. On May 16, 1996, under IATSE International President Tom Short and following a federal district court ruling, those three locals were consolidated into a single national body: Local 600, roughly 6,000 members strong at formation, ending seventy years of a fractured system.
The two organizations aren’t competitors, and plenty of working cinematographers belong to both the ASC credential recognizes achievement and craft, while Local 600 membership is what actually governs wages, hours, health benefits, and pension for camera department crew on union productions. Knowing the difference matters if you’re coming up in the industry: one is something you’re eventually invited into after your peers recognize your work, the other is the union you join to actually work union jobs. They serve completely different purposes, and conflating them is one of the more common mix-ups in how people talk about the camera department.
The ASC. “About the American Society of Cinematographers.” https://theasc.com/about/.
The ASC. “The 15 Founders of the American Society of Cinematographers.” https://theasc.com/the-15-founders-of-the-american-society-of-cinematographers.
Wikipedia. “American Society of Cinematographers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Cinematographers.
International Cinematographers Guild, Local 600. “Short History of the Guild.” https://www.icg600.com/short-history-guild.